News, Views and Analysis

Apologies...

…if you’ve heard all this before. Really. I’m sorry for any offence you might take. In advance.

I haven’t reviewed the no-doubt vast interdisciplinary literature on the subject, but I’m getting tired of these apology thingies, for which again I apologize, and Paul Calandra’s “apology” in the House of Commons didn’t improve my mood. Sorry. But I’d weep too if the Boss told me to get out there and publicly humiliate myself after I’d tried so hard to do the Right Thing. Geeze, it was a twofer, as well, or maybe a threefer: a classic non-answer (knowing Speaker Andrew “PMO” Scheer would once again give it a lazy wink), another solid beat of the pro-Israel drum, and the suggestion that only righteous passion against NDP “anti-Semitism” moved him beyond reason to so misspeak himself. Besides, he didn’t even write the bloody thing.

I’d cry like a baby under those circumstances. Just as Calandra did, in fact, as he haplessly read out his new lines.

Of course, as he says, he’s likely to do it again (when ordered to), so please take this apology as a kind of post-it note affixed to his forehead. Such a slavish loyalist will not be expected to fall on his sword, just walk into the occasional doorknob as required.

“Don’t do it in the first place,” said my mother long ago, when she twigged that I was looking at an apology as a retroactively-applied licence for misbehaviour. And apology or no, I was punished. Exactly right.